Full text of DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.00266a

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
Volume 24.3 September 2000
The Ethnic and Gender Division of Labor
Compared Among Immigrants to Los
Angeles*
RICHARD WRIGHT AND MARK ELLIS
In the 1980s, the Los Angeles’ labor market grew by over 35% by adding 1.8 million new
jobs to the metropolitan economy. Immigrants filled many of these places: between 1985
and 1990, for example, almost 400,000 foreign-born new arrivals joined the Los Angeles’
workforce. This number more than matches New York’s and dominates the next highest
ranked metropolitan area in the United States. Los Angeles’ new immigrant workers, as
elsewhere, joined a metropolitan area segregated to varying degrees at home and at work
along the lines of class, race, ethnicity, nativity and gender. In this paper, we center
attention on some of the mechanisms that drive social differentiation in paid employment.
The production and reconstruction of the division of labor involves a complex set of
interlinked demand and supply side forces. On the demand side, we know that employers
critically shape the division of labor by deliberately recruiting based on ethnicity (e.g.
Bailey and Waldinger, 1991; Waldinger, 1996a) and gender (e.g. Powell, 1993). On the
supply side — the focus of this analysis — one perspective that begins to sort out
processes separates explanations based on individual human capital attributes from those
associated with social capital. Although certain immigrant groups can effectively use
previous training and previously acquired skills to enter and advance in the labor market,
among the foreign-born in contemporary Los Angeles, social capital explanations go
further in unpacking large-scale patterns in the industrial division of labor (Ellis and
Wright, 1999). Building directly on such research outcomes, the analysis of foreign-born
job specialization reported here specifically compares immigrant occupational divisions
of labor in three ways. For six of the most important foreign-born groups entering Los
Angeles in the late 1980s, we weigh the relative importance of nativity, time of arrival
and gender in the allocation of workers to jobs.
The general outline of the role of social capital in immigrant entry into a labor market
is by now well known. A large and growing literature documents how many immigrant
workers gain toeholds in occupational niches. Through family relationships and
acquaintances based on place-of-birth ties at the local, regional or national scale, other
immigrants use these networks to gain a place in a metropolitan economy. What is less
well known is how time of arrival and place of birth interact with gender to construct lines
of difference in occupation choice. Our study of the division of labor among immigrants
offers a new analysis of the ethnic division of labor and occupational sex segregation.
*
Direct correspondence with Richard Wright. Thanks go to John Campbell, Kim England, Christina Gomez
and Deborah King for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The National Science Foundation
(Grant no. SBR-9310647) supported this research.
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Richard Wright and Mark Ellis
Related historical, archival or ethnographic scholarly work tends to rely on case studies of
individual immigrant groups. In contrast, we sacrifice the depth of a case study of one
immigrant group for a broader and comparative analysis of several. In providing an
original broad-brush rendition of the gendered construction of the occupational patterns
of several different foreign-born groups, our investigation adds to the literature on ethnic
networks and ethnic enclaves, as well as research concerned with sex segregation and the
sex typing of occupations.
Immigrants and the Los Angeles labor market
Circumstances of arrival, skills, race, education, ethnicity, class and gender interact to
create a heterogeneity of immigrant employment experience in the United States (e.g.
Portes and Rumbaut, 1996). In Los Angeles in the 1980s, however, previous research
makes clear that generally speaking, many of the foreign-born shared an important
attribute: they disproportionately gained employment relative to the native born (e.g. Ong
and Valenzuela, 1996; Scott, 1996; Wright and Ellis, 1997). Some of these jobs provided
the opportunity for upward mobility and a dignified standard of living; many others,
however, offered only poor pay and tedious, hard, unstable work (e.g. Lopez et al., 1996;
Ortiz, 1996). Nevertheless, immigrants not only held ‘comparative advantage’ in sectors
of growth, but they also even gained employment in stagnant and unstable parts of the
economy (Wright and Ellis, 1997).
Immigrants leveraged relative labor market advantage in Los Angeles in a particular
way. Modest educational levels and relatively poor English language skills explain why
some groups take up certain occupations in Los Angeles (e.g. Lopez et al., 1996).
Research now strongly suggests that ethnic forms of social capital, as much as and
perhaps more than forms of human capital, also provided an important means by which
many immigrants sorted into particular lines of work (Ellis and Wright, 1999). Ellis and
Wright’s findings indicated that what they identified as ‘ethnic resources’ went farther
than skills (measured by years of education) in explaining the sorting of recent arrivals to
the Los Angeles economy into different industrial sectors. The fact that post-1965
immigration policy continues to center on ‘family reunification’ offers another piece of
evidence in favor of considering the influence of social capital-based systems of labor
market entry and incorporation.
The theoretical basis for these empirical observations is strong. Granovetter (1974)
put the operation of networks front and center in our understanding of how people get
jobs. Theories of immigration and settlement often feature the vital role networks play in
the process of migration itself (e.g. Piore, 1979; Hugo, 1981; Boyd, 1989; Gurak and
Caces, 1992; Singer and Massey, 1998) and in the formation of ethnic enclave economies
and ethnic employment niches in the destination (e.g. Wilson and Portes, 1980; Portes,
1987; Light and Bonacich, 1988; Portes and Jensen, 1989; Waldinger, 1993; 1996a). New
arrivals use contacts with family and friends in the ethnic group to find work, thereby
channeling into the same businesses and occupations of earlier co-ethnic arrivals and
reforming the ethnic division of labor. Similar processes help sustain ethnic
neighborhoods as networks and often simultaneously provide newcomers with
information on both housing and jobs.
Once in the country, different forms of social structures affect economic action in US
immigrant communities. Portes and Sensenbrenner (1993), for instance, identify two
sources of social capital — bounded solidarity and enforceable trust — to amplify this
idea. Such forms of capital grow from social forces such as outside discrimination based
on phenotype or cultural difference, the need for preservation of an autonomous cultural
repertoire, blockage of social and economic opportunities, and community monitoring
and sanctioning. Confrontation with nativists may activate ‘dormant feelings of
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The ethnic and gender division of labor among immigrants to Los Angeles
585
nationality among immigrants . . . where none existed before’ (Portes and Sensenbrenner,
1993: 1328). In the same vein, such discrimination may stimulate pan-ethnic solidarities
such that Chinese-Americans, for example, may become, in Eric Liu’s elegant phrasing,
‘accidentally Asian’ (Liu, 1998).
Portes and Sensenbrenner’s remarks specifically address economic outcomes and
social action across different immigrant groups. Recent research by Grasmuck and
Grosfoguel (1997) now makes the case that social capital in immigrant communities is
also gendered. Similarly, we interpret Portes and Sensenbrenner’s (1993) observations
about blockage of opportunity or preservation of cultural traditions as operating
differently for men and women among foreign-born groups. Women and men tend to
access different networks for finding work in the United States or obtain differential
information from networks because of gender typing of jobs.
Just as social capital in an ethnic residential community is gendered, women do not
always tap the same migration information systems as men and often possess inferior
financial resources for moving. Studies of migration and settlement demonstrate the
pervasiveness of difference by gender in immigrant networking. Thus women frequently
do not migrate in tandem with male partners and fashion migration patterns distinct from
men — both in the timing and directionality of the flow (e.g. Morokvasic, 1983; Simon
and Brettel, 1986; Pedraza, 1991; Tienda and Booth, 1991; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994;
Ellis et al., 1996; Pessar, 1999). Gendered obligations often make it more difficult for
women to migrate than men or require that they move for reasons other than employment
(e.g. Donato, 1992; Bailey and Ellis, 1993; Ellis et al., 1996; Pessar, 1999).
A considerable body of evidence now also addresses gender divisions of labor, which
informs us of the patterns of, and the reasons behind, why women and men frequently
work in different jobs in the paid labor force (e.g. Jacobs and Lim, 1992; Reskin, 1993;
Dubeck and Borman, 1996; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1997; Blau et al., 1998; Weeden, 1998).
Hanson and Pratt (1995: 3) observe that, although sex-based segregation has declined
slightly since the turn of the century, the tendency for women to hold different
occupations from men is ‘remarkably persistent’. For example, in 1940, 80% of white
women would have had to switch occupations in order to have the same occupational
distribution as men. In 1988 this proportion had dropped to about 60% and the decline in
occupational sex segregation appeared to have slowed.1
Despite this scholarship on occupational sex segregation and the engendering of the
immigration and migration literature (e.g. Ellis et al., 1996; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1997;
Mahler, 1999; Pessar, 1999), the literature on ethnic enclaves and ethnic niches does not
foreground gender divisions within ethnic groups. Jiobu’s (1988) focus on ‘ethnic
hegemony’ provides a particularly apposite example indicative of this tendency, but the
trend is widespread (e.g. Wilson and Martin, 1982; Zhou and Logan, 1989; Bailey and
Waldinger, 1991; Wright and Ellis, 1997). Recently this has begun to change (e.g.
Gilbertson, 1995; Grasmuck and Grosfoguel, 1997; Hiebert, 1999; Hagan, 1998; Barot et
al., 1999). Studies of the gender dimensions of ethnic employment niches to date,
however, remain generally case based. Few studies systematically inspect differences in
the division of labor by nativity across a metropolitan economy.
The nearest collection of research reports related to our aim of analyzing gender
divisions of labor by group are those that contrast gender and racial/ethnic occupational
segregation for the US as a whole (e.g. Lieberson and Waters, 1988; King, 1992; Reskin
and Cassirer, 1996). For example, in 1988 black-white same-sex occupational segregation
indices for the United States as a whole were 31.8 for men and 29.2 for women — about
1 Black men and women exhibit a similar trend (King, 1992). Also, note that these percentages are derived
from indices of dissimilarity calculated over 159 occupations. The indices of dissimilarity in this paper are
calculated over 14 occupations and thus are not directly comparable because of the sensitivity of the
measure to the number of categories.
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Richard Wright and Mark Ellis
half of the levels of sex segregation within either of these two racial groups (King, 1992).
Analysis of sex segregation among multiple ethnic groups finds a similar pattern outside
the black-white dichotomy. Among a sample of American-born ethnic groups, the
occupational division of labor among women compared to men, was generally more
dissimilar from the expected distribution based on education (Lieberson and Waters,
1988). In other words, factors other than human capital may account more for the
occupations held by women than those held by men. In their analysis of 26 race-ethnic
groups, Reskin and Cassirer (1996) found men are more likely to work in the same jobs as
men of other groups than in the jobs held by women of their own group. Reskin and
Cassirer (1996: 241) go on to argue that ‘gender remains the primary basis by which
workers are sorted into occupations’. Moreover, evidence exists that same-sex
occupational profiles across racial groups have grown more similar in recent decades,
suggesting that gender has become more important, relatively speaking, than race in
determining occupation (Albelda, 1986).
None of these studies systematically inspect differences in the division of labor by
sex and nativity across a metropolitan economy. The research reported here hones in on
some of the mechanisms that form the basis of the durability of occupational sex
segregation by comparing the occupational profiles of immigrant women and men in Los
Angeles for two successive cohorts of entry into the United States. Our method involves
comparisons of occupational profiles between groups by sex using segregation indices.
We conduct the analysis on the Los Angeles Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area
(CMSA) for the late 1980s, a place that has experienced dramatic change in its ethnic
make-up recently because of immigration (e.g. Waldinger and Bozorgmehr, 1996).
We pay particular attention to time of arrival in our study of divisions of labor among
immigrant women and men. By comparing the occupational profiles of recently arrived
immigrants and the resident foreign-born, we begin to assess the strength of the networks
that link new arrivals to settled members of the same ethnic group (Ellis and Wright,
1999). Although indexes of dissimilarity reflect a gendered and ethnicized labor market
of employer preferences and discrimination, they also provide a proxy for network
strength. In general, the smaller the difference between the occupational profiles of two
groups, the larger the network strength. Differentiating immigrants by gender and
ethnicity means we can try to calibrate network strength in both of these dimensions.
Several possibilities present themselves. Ethnicity could be the dominant axis of
difference among immigrants. Here, men and women of each group would tend to work
in the same occupations. Alternatively, ethnicity and gender could interact such that men
and women of each immigrant group develop their own niches distinct from those of men
and women of any other group. Another possibility is that gender could override ethnicity
wherein women from different immigrant groups gravitate to work in the same
occupations as women from other groups. This result would accord with previous
findings on race/ethnic and gender divisions of labor (King, 1992; Reskin and Cassirer,
1996) and would suggest that exclusive, or even primary, emphasis on ethnicity as the key
to comprehending occupational profiles in immigrant society is misplaced. Finally,
because we differentiate recent immigrants from those who arrived earlier, our data show
if ethnicity becomes more or less important than gender in its effect on occupational
segregation after the period of initial settlement.
Data and methods
We use 1990 Public Use Micro Sample (PUMS) data (US Bureau of the Census, 1993) to
match the occupational allocations of the newest entrants (i.e. those arriving from another
country in the five-year period preceding the 1990 census) with those of already settled
members of the same and other groups. We do this across a set of 14 broadly defined
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The ethnic and gender division of labor among immigrants to Los Angeles
587
occupations by sex. Situating the analysis at this scale of disaggregation allows insight
into some of the main occupational dynamics by ethnicity and sex for the whole regional
economy for the six most numerous immigrant groups. A finer-scaled disaggregation
would permit a more nuanced analysis, but creates sample-size problems. For example,
when performing the pilot study, zero counts increased considerably when we doubled the
number of occupations or immigrant groups. The pilot research also revealed that the
results were insensitive to marginal changes in the number of occupations.
Our occupational groups capture broad differences in types of employment. We
structured them to illuminate variability in immigrant employment rather than aggregate
employment; thus some categories have small percentages of total employment but large
proportions of male or female immigrant employment, particularly recent arrivals (see
Table 1). For example, at one end of the occupational spectrum we define five categories
to identify machine operators, construction, food preparation, manual farm and forestry
work, and private household services. Together, private household services and manual
farm and forestry work total less than 3% of all jobs in Los Angeles. They are, however,
important occupations for recent immigrants, especially women — 10% of recent
immigrant women in the labor force hold jobs in private household services and 20% are
manual farm and forestry workers (see Table 1). We define four categories to represent
blue-collar jobs that generally require some skills and experience and which yield modest
wages: mechanics and repair services, precision production and craft occupations,
transportation operators, and protective services (i.e. police, firefighters, corrections
officers). Jobs in these sectors tend to be held by men, both native and foreign-born. We
separated a distinct category for administrative support jobs — a category that accounts
for 17% of all jobs but skewed overwhelmingly toward women who are long-term
residents. Four categories round out the list, each with substantial percentages of native-
born and immigrant workers of both sexes: technicians, sales workers, managers and
professionals.
Contrasting the employment patterns of recent arrivals with comparison groups of the
resident foreign-born allows us to gauge the concentration of new immigrants in the same
occupations as their co-ethnics already at work in the Los Angeles CMSA labor market.
Thus, our analysis allows us to identify some differences by occupational niche: notably,
the relative strength of ethnic networks and the relative importance of gender, in hiring
newcomers. Our data source allows us to analyze paid work only. We therefore only
tangentially speak to the interactions of labor market (re)composition and changes in the
domestic sphere.
We focus principally on two categories of worker. The first we refer to as ‘resident
immigrants’. These workers were born outside the US and its territories and were resident
in Los Angeles on 1 April 1985 and 1990. The second we describe as a ‘recent
immigrant’ worker — someone born outside the US (but not to a US parent) who lived
abroad on 1 April 1985, came to stay in the US between 1985 and 1990, and lived and
worked in Los Angeles on 1 April 1990.2 Early in the analysis we compare the
occupational distribution of these two groups with that of the whole population of
workers in Los Angeles. Thus ‘total’ employment refers to all workers in the paid labor
force counted by the census.
We restrict ourselves to the six largest immigrant groups (Mexicans, Salvadorans,
Filipinos, Guatemalans, South Koreans and Chinese). Each of these groups added more
2 Most definitions of recent immigrants include all those who came to stay in the five-year period before the
census. Ellis and Wright (1998) suggest the added restriction that recent immigrants had also to be outside
the US on 1 April 1985. Accordingly, we exclude those foreign-born workers resident elsewhere in the US
in 1985 and living and working in Los Angeles in 1990. Classifying foreign-born internal migrants in the US
as either internal migrants or immigrants is not straightforward because in many respects they are both. We
decided to treat them as a distinct migrant group requiring separate analysis beyond the scope of the present
paper.
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Richard Wright and Mark Ellis
than 10,000 recent migrants to the workforce of the Los Angeles CMSA between 1985
and 1990; sufficient numbers to permit an occupational analysis by sex of the regional
economy. Migrants from Mexico dominate this flow with over 180,000 new arrivals in
the workforce in those five years, but substantial flows of workers also occurred from
Central America and East and South East Asia. Together, these six groups comprise about
72% of the immigrants who arrived in Los Angeles and took jobs there between 1985 and
1990. The employment profiles of men and women in each of these immigrant groups
across 14 occupations captures details about occupational variation while generating only
a handful of zero counts.
We use a quotient, Q, to highlight relative overrepresentation of group employment
in an occupation (Model, 1993; Waldinger, 1996a; Ellis and Wright, 1999).
Q = (Eij/E.j)/(Ei./E..)
where Eij is the number of workers in ethnic group i in occupation j, E.j is the total
number of workers in occupation j, Ei. is the total number of workers in group i in the
regional economy, and E.. is the total of all workers in the regional economy. After
experimentation we determined ‘overrepresentation’ to occur when a group’s percentage
of employment in an occupation exceeds 1.2 times its percentage share of the total
workforce. Higher levels identified too few concentrations to highlight distinctive
occupational patterns for some groups; lower levels identified too many sectors to
distinguish occupational profiles from one another. For example, 9.71% of all workers are
classified as involved in food preparation and related employment in Los Angeles,
whereas 20.38% of recent immigrant women work in that sector. The ratio of these two
percentages exceeds 1.2, and we therefore consider this an employment concentration for
recent immigrant women (see Table 1).
As we highlight differences by occupation, we also measure the overall difference in
occupational profiles between groups using the index of dissimilarity. This index ranges
between 0 and 100 and measures the percentage share of either group of workers who
would have to be removed without replacement for the two occupational distributions to
be identical (Cortese et al., 1976; Watts, 1998).3 We expect to find relatively low indices
of dissimilarity between the occupational distribution of newcomers and resident co-
ethnics. As gender also acts on occupational structure, then indices of dissimilarity should
be lowest between newcomers and co-ethnic residents of the same sex. If migrant-resident
employment differences are lower within gender categories than within ethnic groups,
then gender may be as, if not more, relevant to sector of employment as ethnicity.
The ethnic and gender division of labor compared
Table 1 displays the occupational division of labor for all workers in 1990 in Los
Angeles, for all men and women, for the resident foreign-born by sex, and recent
immigrants by sex. Shaded boxes indicate occupational concentration. As the last row of
the table also provides the total number of workers in each of the main categories, we see
that the foreign-born (both resident and newly arrived) make up slightly more than 30%
of the workforce of the metropolitan area ([1,862,000 + 392,000]/7,370,000). Switching
attention to the top rows, the table reveals a relatively even distribution (at least in these
aggregate terms) in managerial, professional, technical and sales occupations for all
workers. The absence of shading in all those rows also signals not only a lack of
concentration of the foreign-born in such work but further indicates that the foreign-born
tend to be relatively underrepresented as managers, professionals etc. This occurs because
3 The index is ÆijXi Yij=2, where Xi is the percentage of group X employed in sector i and Yi is the
percentage of group Y employed in sector i.
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Table 1 The occupational distribution of native and foreign-born workers by percentage in the Los Angeles CMSA, 1990, by sexa
Total 1990
Total 1990
Men
Total 1990
Women
Total
Resident
Foreign-
bornb
Resident
Foreign-
born Men
Resident Total Recent
Foreign-
born
Recent
Immigrant
Men
Recent
Immigrant
Women
Immigrantsc
Women
Managers
Professionals
Technicians
Sales
Admin. support
Private house services
Protective services
Food prep. etc.
Farm/forest manual
Mechanics/repair
Construction
Precision
Machine operators
Transport operators
14.18
13.61
3.31
12.06
16.65
0.84
1.63
9.71
1.60
3.25
4.46
3.86
7.24
7.59
14.37
12.42
3.42
11.54
7.76
0.08
2.41
7.91
2.39
5.45
7.63
5.18
7.82
11.61
13.95
15.17
3.17
12.74
28.32
1.84
0.59
12.06
0.56
0.37
0.31
2.13
6.48
9.95
8.48
2.80
9.90
12.39
1.73
0.70
13.18
3.08
3.38
4.45
6.05
14.87
9.05
10.08
7.54
2.79
9.13
6.63
0.12
1.02
11.44
4.43
5.46
7.22
7.27
13.95
12.92
9.75
9.87
2.80
11.05
20.96
4.12
0.22
15.75
1.09
0.28
0.32
10.27
5.72
2.16
8.56
7.97
3.54
0.52
18.00
4.04
2.78
5.73
4.15
15.47
11.11
9.56
5.35
2.06
7.36
5.09
0.31
0.74
16.75
5.61
4.10
8.57
4.52
14.66
15.32
11.62
6.43
2.34
10.84
13.45
9.70
0.10
20.38
1.03
0.26
0.32
4.24
16.25
3.29
3.43
17.01
3.09
2.31
Number (in millions)
7.37
4.183
3.187
1.862
1.112
0.749
0.392
0.257
0.135
a
Highlighted numbers indicate an employment concentration — where group employment in a sector is at least 120% of the group’s share of the total workforce.
Foreign-born workers resident in Los Angeles in 1985 and 1990.
Immigrants, came to stay between 1985 and 1990, and abroad in 1985.
b
c

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Richard Wright and Mark Ellis
a preponderance of the foreign-born in Los Angeles lack enough formal education
(human capital) that would help qualify them for such work (Waldinger and Bozorgmehr,
1996; Ellis and Wright, 1999).
This table reveals a clear division of labor between men and women, typical of most
places in advanced capitalist economies. Male-dominated occupations in Los Angeles,
irrespective of nativity or time in the United States, include manual agricultural work,
construction, mechanics and repair, and transport operators (column 2). Women are
overrepresented in private household services, food preparation and administrative
support (column 3). These patterns of concentration, however, vary by nativity and time
in the United States. The employment specializations of recent immigrants differ from
those of all workers and of the resident foreign-born in some important ways. Recent
immigrant men (column 7) share an employment concentration with all resident foreign-
born workers (column 4) in agriculture, construction, mechanics and repair, and machine
operators. Resident foreign-born men (column 5), however, concentrate more in precision
occupations, whereas newly arrived men are more likely to take up work in food
preparation.
Foreign-born women, and most notably those new to the country, take jobs
disproportionately in domestic service (columns 6 and 9). Less than 1% of the total
workforce have a job in this occupational grouping, compared to over 4% of resident
foreign-born women and almost 10% of recently arrived women. Foreign-born women
also concentrate in machine operator occupations. Overall, Table 1 contains less shading
for women than men, meaning that men tend to specialize more in particular occupations
than do women.
Table 1 can only sketch the most basic outline of the occupational architecture of the
Los Angeles metropolitan area by sex and time of arrival. Table 2 adds a little more detail
by systematically quantifying differences between the overall occupational distributions
of recent immigrants and residents using the index of dissimilarity. To aid interpretation,
we divide the table into two main sections. The numbers in the box report dissimilarity
indices for between-sex comparisons. The numbers outside the box report three matched
dissimilarity indices for women to women and men to men comparisons.
Table 2 provides several impressions of the degrees of occupational segregation by
place of birth and sex in Los Angeles in 1990. The table shows that the range of
dissimilarity values for between-sex comparisons (29.21 to 45.17 — those within the box)
barely overlaps with the range of dissimilarity indices for within-sex comparisons (11.13
to 29.26). The ratio of between-sex and same-sex indices ranges between 1.5 and 2.6.
This accords with calculations of the same ratio in other studies comparing the effects of
sex and race on occupational distributions (Reskin and Cassirer, 1996). In other words,
even using 14 aggregated occupations, these data highlight the relative dominance of sex
over nativity as an axis of division in the labor market. The dissimilarity indices disclose a
much closer alignment of occupational profiles for women/women and men/men
comparisons than comparisons of women to men, regardless of nativity.
Table 2 confirms our earlier observation that women are less concentrated in
occupational niches than men. For example, the data reveal that it would require over
29% of recent immigrant women to change jobs to match the occupational distribution of
all women in the workforce. In comparison, only about 23% of the percentage of newly
arrived immigrant men (relative to all employed men) would have to shift occupations for
the two employment distributions to be identical. Simply put, newly arrived immigrant
men are more likely to work in male-dominated sectors than newly arrived women are
likely to work in female-dominated sectors. This pattern recurs for both the resident
foreign-born and total (19.38 versus 15.15) and recently arrived immigrants and the
resident foreign-born (12.83 versus 11.13).
The dissimilarity indices in Table 2 offer more information about the dynamics of
occupational segregation between native and foreign-born women and men. The greatest
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The ethnic and gender division of labor among immigrants to Los Angeles
591
Table 2 Dissimilarity indices among the occupational distribution of total workforce, the
resident foreign-born and recent immigrants by sex, Los Angeles CMSA, 1990
All
Resident
Recent
All
Resident
Recent
Women
Foreign- Immigrant
Men
Foreign- Immigrant
born
Women
Women
born
Men
Men
All Women
Resident Foreign-born Women 19.38
—
—
Recent Immigrant Women
29.26
12.83
—
All Men
Resident Foreign-born Men
Recent Immigrant Men
30.41
39.51
45.17
33.51
29.21
30.42
36.97
31.65
30.64
—
15.15
23.77
—
11.13
—
difference in occupational distribution occurs between all women and recent immigrant
men (45.17). This difference, however, moderates with time in the Los Angeles labor
market: 39% of resident foreign-born men would have to change occupations for their
occupational distribution to resemble that of all women. When factoring in native-born
men, this proportion drops to about 30%. Length-of-residence also affects same-sex levels
of occupational segregation. Comparing recent immigrant women with all women
produces an index of dissimilarity of 29.26%, whereas the level of segregation between
resident foreign-born women and all women is only 19%. For recent immigrant men
compared with all men, the index of dissimilarity is 24%, but between resident foreign-
born men and all men it is only 15%.
Generally, Table 2 identifies a crude gradient from the lower left corner toward the
main diagonal. Occupational segregation is greatest between men and women,
particularly between recent immigrant men and women. Segregation levels diminish
considerably for same-sex comparisons. The diminution of occupational segregation with
length of residence, both same-sex and between sexes, implies that immigrants’
occupational patterns become more like those of other workers in Los Angeles the longer
they work there. In other words, these data offer some evidence for immigrant
assimilation into Los Angeles’ occupational structure over time.
Although the information in Table 2 displays some interesting patterns of
occupational segregation, it does not shed any light on the role of gender and ethnicity
within national origin groups. Previous research demonstrates the role of ethnicity in
linking new immigrants to jobs (e.g. Portes and Jensen, 1989; Waldinger, 1996a; Hagan,
1998). Table 3 allows us to assess how much these ethnic effects interact with and are
possibly even dominated by gender within national origin groups. Table 3 lists the
occupational profiles of the major immigrant populations subdivided by sex and broad
categories of time in the United States. As in Table 1, shaded cells indicate employment
concentrations relative to the aggregate profile for Los Angeles. Note how the shaded
boxes often, but not always, occur in lateral pairs. Recent women immigrants from South
Korea, for instance, disproportionately cluster in machine operator occupations, as do
women born in South Korea who arrived in the United States before 1985. In other words,
new immigrants take up jobs in approximately the same sectors as resident co-ethnics of
the same sex. This highlights the gendered nature of ethnic job focusing, and the table
offers abundant evidence of this phenomenon for all six groups.
In some groups, men and women tend to converge on the same occupations; in
others, channeling is clearly more gendered. Immigrants from the Philippines, for
example, display a concentration of employment in ‘administrative support’ and Koreans
in ‘sales’. These occupational concentrations occur for both men and women regardless of
ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000

Table 3 The sectoral distribution of recent immigrants and the resident foreign-born by sex for Los Angeles, 1990
Resident
Mexican
Women Immigrant
Women
Recent Resident
Mexican Mexican
Recent
Mexican Salvadoran
Resident
Recent
Salvadoran
Immigrant
Women
Resident
Salvadoran
Men
Recent Resident
Salvadoran Filipinas
Immigrant
Recent Resident
Filipina Filipinos
Immigrants
Recent
Filipino
Immigrants
Men Immigrant
Woman
52,387
Men
Men
Number
270,258
49,583 523,099
130,491
10,701
64,516
16,305
61,115
13,403
50,874
12,577
Managers
Professionals
Technicians
Sales
5.63
3.96
1.10
8.73
15.65
3.88
0.22
17.77
2.46
0.32
0.51
5.92
28.17
5.68
11.04
1.01
0.48
7.93
5.66
10.15
0.06
26.20
2.25
0.40
0.38
3.53
25.95
4.96
4.59
1.81
1.04
4.63
4.49
0.11
0.63
14.42
7.52
5.62
8.83
8.33
20.18
17.78
5.80
1.31
0.53
3.23
2.42
0.21
0.14
21.51
9.30
3.56
4.33
2.43
1.58
10.56
1.39
0.44
6.24
2.78
26.25
0.00
21.54
0.41
0.17
0.54
3.07
21.99
4.61
5.91
2.27
1.76
7.08
6.87
0.16
1.13
15.76
2.62
6.40
9.32
6.04
17.25
17.43
6.48
1.05
0.16
4.37
4.23
1.10
0.75
19.04
3.47
4.67
11.53
22.69
7.69
8.61
31.68
0.67
0.23
9.20
0.05
0.09
0.03
2.41
4.39
0.74
9.72
12.44
7.66
13.51
33.87
1.67
0.25
11.98
0.13
0.21
0.00
2.82
4.45
15.54
13.44
8.86
8.91
19.28
0.09
2.91
7.66
0.52
4.18
2.52
4.47
6.56
5.07
9.07
5.61
7.59
8.21
23.38
0.31
5.17
12.19
0.80
3.41
0.73
4.25
8.13
11.16
8.40
Admin. support
Private house services
Protective services
Food prep. etc.
Farm/forest manual
Mechanics/repair
Construction
Precision
Machine operators
Transport operators
11.06
16.74
0.24
24.75
0.61
0.38
0.45
3.77
22.02
3.23
10.37
4.49
18.26
18.85
12.69
4.80
16.39
20.82
1.28
Resident-recent
immigrant dissimilarity
index, by gender
20.19
12.78
33.61
17.21
12.39
36.01
12.12
19.06
23.78
Male-female recent
immigrant dissimilarity
index
35.48
39.83
24.69
Male-female resident
dissimilarity index

Table 3 continued
Resident
Guatemalan
Women
Recent
Guatemalan
Immigrant
Women
Resident
Guatemalan
Men
Recent Resident
Guatemalan Korean
Recent Resident
Korean Korean
Recent Resident
Korean Chinese
Recent Resident
Chinese Chinese
Recent
Chinese
Immigrant
Men
Woman Immigrant
Women
Men Immigrant Women Immigrant
Men Immigrant
Men
Men
Women
6,763
Number
23,458
7,633
32,567
12,124
28,797
6,395
35,317
9,672
26,646
31,117
7,530
Managers
5.91
3.01
1.40
6.93
12.07
20.97
0.06
23.83
0.19
0.21
0.27
4.18
17.14
3.85
4.82
2.00
0.75
5.63
4.70
34.10
0.00
26.82
0.00
0.00
0.00
2.58
17.58
1.01
4.73
1.90
0.93
4.74
6.43
0.18
1.47
15.11
2.03
7.86
7.15
2.02
0.82
4.20
4.14
0.62
0.24
19.47
3.24
6.82
12.82
12.49
2.35
26.87
18.69
0.36
0.07
10.38
0.16
0.16
0.61
3.14
10.28
1.61
10.84
7.68
0.64
26.38
16.62
1.30
0.00
15.82
0.00
0.00
0.96
19.50
12.15
3.62
28.70
6.23
0.05
0.35
4.46
0.89
4.20
6.62
4.08
5.83
3.33
20.23
6.13
1.28
27.93
4.96
0.16
1.39
8.80
0.33
4.19
9.59
4.14
5.52
5.36
19.08
14.14
4.85
14.26
25.66
1.43
0.21
8.52
0.00
0.00
0.18
1.70
9.20
0.77
12.20
14.64
3.52
13.19
16.66
2.29
0.00
11.78
0.43
0.00
0.00
3.24
19.28
2.77
21.59
22.48
4.70
16.56
6.04
0.35
0.24
13.17
0.43
2.23
1.85
3.96
3.29
3.10
17.90
18.67
7.73
12.07
7.58
0.41
0.31
18.61
0.00
2.32
1.71
2.50
6.59
3.60
Professionals
Technicians
Sales
Admin. support
Private house services
Protective services
Food prep. etc.
Farm/forest manual
Mechanics/repair
Construction
Precision
Machine operators
Transport operators
11.66
7.75
16.70
18.52
11.09
3.68
21.81
14.70
3.92
13.45
2.38
Resident-recent
immigrant dissimilarity
index, by gender
16.57
13.67
40.54
11.45
11.28
23.48
18.66
14.02
26.75
Male-female recent
immigrant dissimilarity
index
42.83
29.30
25.94
Male-female resident
dissimilarity index

594
Richard Wright and Mark Ellis
length of residence. Immigrant men and women from China, however, exhibit
occupational profiles more distinct from each other: Chinese men concentrate in
managerial and professional occupations, whereas Chinese women have a more diffuse
distribution. More generally, the occupational contours of the three Asian groups are quite
distinct from each other and show variable amounts of sex segregation within groups. The
occupational profiles of Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans resemble each other but
differ from the pattern of any Asian group. Moreover, the occupational distribution of
immigrants from Mexico and Central America is strongly segregated. The men tend to
work in construction, mechanical and repair occupations, agricultural work and food
preparation; the women in private household services, food preparation and as machine
operators.
Table 3 includes summary measures of the level of occupational segregation by both
nativity and sex. The first row of the lower section of the table reports, using the index of
dissimilarity, the degree to which new immigrants work in the same sectors as their
foreign-born counterparts of the same sex. To illustrate, the occupational profile of
recently arrived Mexican men more closely resembles the profile of Mexican men who
arrived earlier (12.78) than it does recently arrived Mexican women (35.48). Likewise,
recently arrived Mexican women are more likely to find work alongside resident Mexican
women (20.19) than in the same occupations as recently arrived Mexican men. With the
exception of women from the Philippines, recently arrived men are more likely than
recently arrived immigrant women to cluster with co-ethnics of the same sex. The
occupational profile of Filipinas, however, is quite distinctive. Both resident and recently
arrived women from the Philippines disproportionately cluster in ‘administrative support’
types of occupations (which includes health-related jobs such as nurses and medical
technicians). No other group of foreign-born women displays such concentration in one
occupational niche.
With the exception of Chinese immigrants, the differences between the occupational
profiles of women and men diminish with time in the country. As a case in point, the level
of sex segregation between recent Guatemalan immigrants (42.83) is greater than that
between Guatemalans who arrived in the US before 1985 (40.54). Admittedly, these
changes are relatively small, but they are systematic except for the Chinese. In sum,
foreign-born men and women enter different occupations in Los Angeles. The differences
in these profiles, with one exception, diminish slightly over the time period under
investigation.
Table 3 emphasizes intra-ethnic occupational segregation by sex and time of arrival.
Containing 144 indices of dissimilarity, Table 4 yields considerable information about not
only intra-ethnic occupational segmentation, but also interethnic occupational segmenta-
tion by time of arrival and sex. To facilitate interpretation, sex and time of arrival
subdivide the table into four quadrants to separate dissimilarity indices. The numbers in
bold on the main diagonal of the full table describe the degree of segregation between
recent arrivals and residents of the same nativity group and sex. The bold numbers on the
two off-diagonals summarize the occupational segregation between immigrant cohorts of
the same nativity group but different sex. Any entry shaded gray ranks among the lowest
20% of dissimilarity scores in the table.
Given the importance of gender in the results reported so far, we would expect the
dissimilarity indices on the main diagonal to contain the lowest values. With only one
exception, this holds true. For instance, recent immigrant women from South Korea
obtain work in occupations more like those of previously arrived immigrant women from
South Korea than those of any other nativity group. Newly arrived Salvadoran men are
the exception: their occupational profile is slightly more like that of resident Guatemalan-
born men than resident Salvadoran-born men, but the difference is small. Even in this
case, the same-sex segregation level (12.39) is lower than the degree of between-sex
(same group) segregation (40.65).
ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000

Table 4 Dissimilarity indices for recent immigrants and the resident foreign-born, by sex, by nativity
Resident Immigrants
Men
Women
Mexicans Salvadorans Filipinos Guatemalans Koreans Chinese Mexicans Salvadorans Filipinas Guatemalans Koreans Chinese
Recent Immigrants
Men
Mexicans
Salvadorans
Filipinos
Guatemalans
Koreans
12.78
14.50
42.03
13.41
45.53
51.88
15.96
12.39
34.16
12.79
39.55
43.17
56.11
51.89
19.06
51.15
32.28
22.06
16.66
11.36
38.97
13.67
43.28
48.96
57.74
53.91
44.24
52.38
11.28
27.52
58.31
55.08
39.90
53.32
26.88
14.02
37.01
35.32
33.04
30.13
50.27
41.08
39.59
40.65
43.07
34.00
55.72
43.28
69.45
65.91
28.69
63.92
50.60
28.42
39.10
39.01
41.30
37.43
54.73
42.93
60.07
56.93
31.49
54.89
27.70
30.40
65.98
62.04
29.07
60.48
37.23
25.08
Chinese
Women Mexicans
Salvadorans
Filipinas
38.55
42.65
62.19
48.03
48.59
45.83
35.11
41.26
54.82
45.33
40.59
40.50
49.73
55.47
25.10
64.20
33.74
24.53
40.04
45.12
59.96
47.61
45.55
46.19
54.95
60.72
41.11
68.16
30.62
35.94
49.16
54.47
33.28
61.68
34.16
28.56
20.19
31.09
42.16
39.27
28.00
25.14
15.46
17.21
49.41
19.92
35.97
32.41
56.25
61.01
12.12
64.68
38.18
26.59
20.79
16.04
48.07
16.57
34.30
33.28
47.34
52.00
23.62
57.48
11.45
17.17
52.02
56.78
16.73
60.47
28.30
18.66
Guatemalans
Koreans
Chinese

596
Richard Wright and Mark Ellis
We can see this more clearly by contrasting values on the main diagonal of the table
with those on the two off-diagonals (in the bottom left and top right quadrants). Recently
arrived women workers from El Salvador have an occupational profile far more similar
to resident women workers from El Salvador than resident men born in that country
(17.21 and 41.26). Considering all six groups of immigrants, the degree of difference
varies with nativity, but the direction of difference is consistent and clear. Nativity
matters in determining the occupational concentration of immigrant workers, but sex
matters more.
Broadening the discussion to consider interethnic occupational profile difference by
sex and nativity re-emphasizes this finding. The pattern of the lowest 20% of dissimilarity
index scores is unmistakable. Twenty-six of the twenty-nine shaded boxes are in the top
left or bottom right quadrants of the matrix. Were nativity to rival sex in importance, we
would expect that the off-diagonal dissimilarity values (those along the minor diagonals
of the top right and bottom left quadrants) would rank among the lowest 20% of
dissimilarity indices, yet only two of the twelve do so.
The data in this table also suggest that within ethnic groups, men tend to channel
slightly more than do women. The average score on the diagonal in the upper left
quadrant is 13.9; in the lower right quadrant it is 16. If we compare the average
dissimilarity index, however, for all men to men (all scores in the upper left quadrant) and
all women to women (all scores in the lower right quadrant) comparisons, we find no
difference. The average index in both quadrants of the table is 34. This average is
significantly lower (p < .01) than the mean index in the other two quadrants of the table
where the mean dissimilarity index comparing recent immigrant women with resident
immigrant men is 44 and the mean dissimilarity index of recent immigrant men with
resident immigrant women is 45.
Although mean occupational segregation levels are lower for same-sex than between-
sex pairs, standard deviations are higher for the between-sex quadrants of the table. The
standard deviations of values in the upper left quadrant and lower right quadrant are 16.9
and 16.2 respectively. This compares with 12.9 and 11.2 for the indices in the upper right
and lower left portions of the table. In other words, although we find the lowest
dissimilarity indices when making same-sex comparisons (e.g. resident Korean women
immigrants and recent immigrant Chinese-born women [17.17]), some of the largest
differences occur in the same region of the matrix (e.g. recent immigrant women from
Guatemala and resident Filipinas [64.68]). Gender, then, may be a more important axis of
difference than ethnicity among immigrants in the labor market; but that does not preclude
substantial interethnic difference in occupational specialization among workers of the
same sex.
Discussion and conclusions
Patterns of work specialization are central to the broader spectrum of separation and
difference in any society. The ideas that ethnic queues and ethnic networks route
immigrant workers into certain jobs carry key assumptions about work and gender
divisions of labor (within and beyond the workplace). This paper finds that a focus on
ethnicity as the key division of labor among immigrants compared to natives, while very
important, tends to occlude analysis of significant gender differences within (and
between) ethnic groups. We suggest that the interest in immigrant employment as
determined by ethnic resources has really been about immigrant men (cf. Grasmuck and
Grosfoguel, 1997). In mitigation, men do outnumber women in the labor force and this is
true of all the immigrant groups studied in this investigation (see Table 3). Nevertheless,
the debate over ethnic queues, niches and enclaves frequently focuses explicitly or
implicitly on men rather than women.
ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000

The ethnic and gender division of labor among immigrants to Los Angeles
597
We find large differences in occupational profile by sex and a systematic dominance
of sex over nativity in the allocation of recent arrivals to jobs. Among all the forces
operating to sift labor into distinct lines of work, we therefore suspect that the social
networks that provide immigrant women and men (of the same migrant cohort and the
same national origin) information on jobs are but distantly related. These findings emerge
from an analysis based on a relatively coarse set of 14 occupational categories; more
detailed job categories would be likely to bring the gender division of labor within
national origin groups into even sharper focus than revealed here.
A conclusion that women and men probably have different access to general and
specific resources for finding work is unsurprising. The gender division of labor is well
documented and, as noted earlier, temporally resilient (e.g. Hanson and Pratt, 1995).
Nevertheless, we stress caution in reaching the simple conclusion that ethnicity matters
less than gender in the labor market. Immigrant women are more likely to funnel into
occupations where other immigrant women work, regardless of nativity, than into jobs
beside co-ethnic men; but it is also the case that some of the largest interethnic differences
in occupational distributions occur among workers of the same sex. Thus we prefer to
describe our findings as evidence for a broad division of labor between immigrant women
and men within which there is a substantial degree of ethnic specialization among
workers of the same sex.
Our data point to substantial interethnic variation in the gender division of labor
within groups. In some groups (Guatemalans, Mexicans and Salvadorans) ethnic
resources seem sharply divided along gender lines, as shown by the distinctive
occupational profiles for women and men. In other occupational distributions, women and
men of the same ethnic group are more likely to work alongside each other (Filipinas/os,
Chinese and Koreans), intimating that networks are probably less gender exclusive. That
said, although we show that Filipino women and men are more likely to work along side
each other than, say, Guatemalan women and men, this does not mean that wage
inequality or more general discrimination in the labor market is less of an issue for
Filipinas. Overall, in the context of the 14 occupations we used to frame this study,
immigrant men had more occupational niches — measured as the number of sectors in
which they had an occupational concentration — than did immigrant women. As such,
our results stand in contrast to those of Lieberson and Waters (1988: 133) who found the
reverse. Their work, however, examined only European immigrants and was conducted
for the United States as a whole. Thus gender differences in the degree of occupational
specialization are not universal; we suspect that they depend on the place and the
particular groups under investigation.
The notion that place makes for difference in immigrant employment patterns needs
more attention. Some existing research is suggestive of place effects. For example,
Ettlinger and Kwon (1994) detail differences in occupational profile and industrial
employment between New York and Los Angles for different Asian immigrant groups;
Gurak and Kritz (1992) argue that social context rather than cultural differences account
for differences in understanding Dominican and Colombian women’s employment
patterns; and Di Leonardo (1984) found that Italian immigrants on the West Coast
possessed an entrepreneurial class and a different tradition of work than Thernstrom
(1973) in his research on Bostonian Italians.
Generally, patterns of employment for immigrants will vary according to local labor
market conditions (Waldinger, 1996b; Wright and Ellis, 1997). These regional
circumstances are likely to interact with the way in which immigrants use networks to
find jobs. In buoyant, growing economies, such as Los Angeles in the 1980s, immigrants
may rely less on ethnic networks because of the numerous employment opportunities in
the region than in places like New York, which experienced relatively slow job growth in
the late 1980s. The local environment may also affect the way in which gender and
ethnicity combine to influence occupational outcomes. Rapid employment growth may
ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000

598
Richard Wright and Mark Ellis
bring more women into the labor force attracted by new job opportunities and higher
wages. This could reduce the intra-ethnic same-sex job channeling of women if these jobs
occur outside existing occupational employment concentrations.
Richard Wright (Richard.wright@dartmouth.edu), Department of Geography, Dart-
mouth College, Hanover, NH 03755-3571 and Mark Ellis (ellism@u.washington.edu),
Department of Geography, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-3550, USA.
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